Licensing can keep the journalism industry afloat.

Roger Lynch, CEO of magazine publisher Condé Nast, disagreed. "Fair use is to allow criticism, parody, scholarship, research, news reporting," he told the senators. "The law is clear when there is an adverse effect on the market for the copyrighted material ... Fair use is not intended to simply enrich tech companies that prefer not to pay."

There are other ways that tools like ChatGPT can eat into publishers' profits beyond reproducing their stories. Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance trade association, noted that chatbots designed to crawl the web and act like a search engine, like Microsoft Bing or Perplexity, can summarize articles too.

Readers could ask them to extract and condense information from news reports, meaning there would be less incentive for people to visit publishers' sites, leading to a loss of traffic and ad revenue. "There would be no business model for us in that ecosystem," she said during the hearing.

Licensing agreements will keep the journalism industry afloat since it'd give media outlets a way to make money from generative AI. The deals need to be negotiated in a way that wouldn't prevent smaller developers from building their own large language models. Jeff Jarvis, who recently retired from the City University of New York's Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, is against licensing for all uses and was afraid it could set precedents that would affect journalists and small, open source companies competing with Big Tech.